At least one inventive concept herein relates to display devices, and more particularly, to a display drive circuit and/or a standby power reduction method thereof.
A display device outputs image data as a visual image. Recently, as display devices become larger and have increased resolution, power consumption of these display devices increases. As such, the demand for extended battery life is increasing due to high quality and multifunction of a portable display device.
In a flat display, a backlight unit (BLU) consumes more than 80% of the overall power for the flat display. Thus, various methods for reducing power consumption by controlling a backlight unit (BLU) are being researched.
Drive methods of a display panel are generally classified into a dot inversion method, a column inversion method, a line inversion method and a frame inversion method. The dot inversion method has superior display ability but consumes large quantities of power. The frame inversion method consumes smaller quantities of power but has a poor display ability. As one can appreciate then, power consumption of a panel depends on a drive method. A column inversion method is being widely used now.
In the column inversion method, standby power of a source driver IC consumes a great part of the overall power. The source driver IC includes a Gamma amplifier supplying a grey voltage and a source amplifier supplying a voltage to a panel. The amount of power that the Gamma amplifier and the source amplifier consume in the source driver IC is a large part of power consumption. Thus, power consumption of a display device can be effectively reduced by reducing standby power being consumed in the Gamma amplifier and the source amplifier.